The National Museum of Computing

The National Museum of Computing, located at Bletchley Park, is an independent charity housing the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer and the WITCH, the world's oldest working digital computer. The Museum enables visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of the 1940s through the large systems and mainframes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and beyond.

Venue Type:

Museum

Opening hours

TNMOC All Galleries: open Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons (12 noon to 5pm in summer or 4pm in winter) plus summer bank holidays and special public opening during major school holidays.

Organisations can arrange special visits and tours and use TNMOC's seminar room facilities.

Admission charges

Entrance to the whole of TNMOC is £7.50 per person (£5 concessions). Family tickets £20.Entry is free to TNMOC members.

The Colossus and the Tunny Galleries are open daily. A £3 fee (£3 for concessions, free for children 12 and under) is charged.

Getting there

Full directions here: http://www.tnmoc.org/visit/getting-here

Links

Additional info

We are able to offer tailored programmes for educational, corporate or special interest groups upon request.

The collection is 90% hands on. We have examples of most of the popular home computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore and BBC Micro. We also have a large selection of business machines, a couple of working DEC minicomputers (one from Blacknest, the Goverment seismic activity monitoring station) and a 1960's Elliott 803 mainframe also working (sometimes!!).

The machines are loaded with a variety of business software, games and programming languages, most of which are ready for you to have a go.

Collection details

Industry, Science and Technology, Social History, Weapons and War

Key artists and exhibits

One of the most important items in the collection is an Apple Lisa. This was the first commercial machine to use a graphical interface, it was released in 1984 and pre-dates Windows.

Events details are listed below. You may need to scroll down or click on headers to see them all. For events that don't have a specific date see the 'Resources' tab above.

Festival or fair

Summer Bytes

1 — 30 August 2015 *on now

Pop-up digital events throughout the month. Lots of demonstrations and hands-on opportunities amongst the amazing heritage of 70 years of computing.

Getting there

Website

E-mail

Telephone

01908 374708

All information is drawn from or provided by the venues themselves and every effort is made to ensure it is correct. Please remember to double check opening hours with the venue concerned before making a special visit.